


Routines

by springsdandelion (writergirlie)



Category: Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-14
Updated: 2012-05-14
Packaged: 2017-11-05 09:29:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/404873
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/writergirlie/pseuds/springsdandelion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Routines are a part of Katniss Everdeen's life again, and she reflects on the most important routine of all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Routines

He wakes up every morning in the pre-dawn darkness. A baker’s day starts early, when the entire town is still sleeping, oblivious to the emerging sun that’s just starting to break through the distant horizon, as the moon slowly dips out of sight behind wisps of clouds. He takes care not to disturb me when he slips out of bed, but somewhere in the territory between dreams and consciousness, I always feel the light graze of his lips on my forehead just before he leaves, a whisper of a kiss like a feather brushing over my skin. It works its way into the images my mind is still conjuring up, leaving behind a vague sense of happiness as I emerge, surfacing once again from the land of nightmares, and still feeling the lingering warmth of his arms, which had held me throughout the night.

 

Every morning, it is like this. The routine we’ve established.

 

Routines have been a part of my life, ever since I can remember. When I was little and still in the care of both parents, my routine was simple: school and play, and chores as I grew older. After my father died and my world was thrown into chaos, routines kept my sanity intact. They gave me a reason to focus, tasks to complete. Only later, after the Hunger Games, did I begin to chafe against the confines of routines.

 

Schedules that had been devised without any input from me. Expectations, requirements, obligations—always under the noose of threats. Choices that had been taken away from me, before I ever even knew that there were alternatives.

 

I longed to break free of the routines. Longed to blaze my own trail, make my own decisions. Choose whom to love.

 

I think about when it was exactly that loving Peeta become part of my routine. When it was that he had worked his way into me, rooting himself there, transforming from a want into a need.

 

In a way, he’d woven himself into my fabric from the very beginning, in the simple act of giving me the bread that saved me, breathed life into me again. But it was a debt that had to be repaid, and I was never any good at holding a debt. When the Capitol intervened, I lost yet another choice, another opportunity to have a say in how my path was supposed to cross with that of Peeta Mellark, and in my resentment, I did the only thing I could: resist.

 

I resisted for a long time.

 

Loving him came naturally, even if I couldn’t bring myself to acknowledge it until much later. It rose from deep within me, an instinct that couldn’t be contained, that came out time and time again, no matter how many times I tried to deny it or change its meaning. Rationalize it. But love defies rationalization. Because it can’t be reasoned with.

 

I still can’t pinpoint exactly when the shift happened. It’s as though my body knew it before I did—sought his arms in the aftermath of a nightmare, sought his lips in the need for contact, sought his skin for proof of heat. Life. The promise that there was still goodness left in this world, that it hadn’t been eliminated completely in all of the destruction we had to live through.

 

But when my heart finally caught up to what my body had figured out long ago, I knew it. Felt it in my bones, in my blood. Felt it in the way I instinctively reach for him in the opening minutes of each day, in the way I willingly mold my body against his in the dying notes of the night.

 

Routines are a part of my life again. And loving Peeta has become the most important one of all.


End file.
